Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl, 2005
Still: Courtesy the artist
Collection
Single-channel video installation (transferred from Super 8 film), color, silent
6 min 26 sec
Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl) explores memory and truth through a one-way epistolary exchange with a dead artist, the Mexican painter and writer Gerardo Murillo (1875-1964), a citizen of Guadalajara who signed his works Dr. Atl. In the film Mario García Torres discusses with him the possible implications of installing a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in the unspoiled Mexican landscape of the surroundings of Guadalajara, the Barranca de Oblatos, which Murillo, a traveling painter, depicted several times. García Torres addresses an imagined space of the existent (or nonexistent), focusing on gaps, blank spaces, the remains of the erased and left out. He plays once more with ideas of displacement, speculation, and reemergence, this time engendered through the art world's selective globalism. Using the historical frameworks of Dr. Atl and the Guggenheim's expansionist global vision, García Torres imagines a new account of a possible situation.
*1975 in Monclova, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico
6 min 26 sec
Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl) explores memory and truth through a one-way epistolary exchange with a dead artist, the Mexican painter and writer Gerardo Murillo (1875-1964), a citizen of Guadalajara who signed his works Dr. Atl. In the film Mario García Torres discusses with him the possible implications of installing a branch of the Guggenheim Museum in the unspoiled Mexican landscape of the surroundings of Guadalajara, the Barranca de Oblatos, which Murillo, a traveling painter, depicted several times. García Torres addresses an imagined space of the existent (or nonexistent), focusing on gaps, blank spaces, the remains of the erased and left out. He plays once more with ideas of displacement, speculation, and reemergence, this time engendered through the art world's selective globalism. Using the historical frameworks of Dr. Atl and the Guggenheim's expansionist global vision, García Torres imagines a new account of a possible situation.
*1975 in Monclova, Mexico | Living and working in Mexico City, Mexico
Mario García Torres on the exhibition “An Arrival Tale” at TBA21, Vienna 2016